Mastering Peter Principle: Art of Making Yourself Redundant

Hi everyone. I'm Utkarsh, the CEO of Network Capital, here to talk to you about the Peter Principle. Peter Principle was invented by a Canadian scholar and a hierarchologist who said that people in an organization, any kind of hierarchy, essentially lie or rise to the level of their incompetence. It's a counterintuitive sounding rule, but it works perfectly when you look at any complex organization, be it in the private sector, public sector, NGO sector, or what have you. So how do you apply Peter Principle to your life? So, normally we assume that we will keep rising to the next level of our performance. If we do better, we rise up the ranks. But there comes a time in our lives when our career growth slows down where either we get too comfortable where we are or we like the brand of the organization we work for a bit too much, or albeit just like happy and satisfied with the work that is given to us and our lifestyle around it. I don't think there's anything wrong with that. In fact, it's essential that for anyone looking to advance his or her career, they look at doing the job in front of them to the best of their ability. But with this said, there has to be something that we all need to think about, and that is the Beta principle. Normally, when you look at where people stop growing is this exact place where the maximum level of their competence is established. At least in the organization's perspective, they believe that this level X, designation Y, is the best that this person can do. And if we do not want to, you know, suffer from the Beta principle and keep advancing and growing our career in the times to come, we need to figure out a way to make our current job redundant. Yes, you heard that right. Make your current job redundant. Why do you need to do that? So the simple reason is any job comprises lots of steps, lots of procedures that can over time be automated. But the whole purpose of doing the job day in and day out is that we get better at the simple tasks, the more complicated aspects of it, with deliberate practice. So with deliberate practice, our overall efficiency increases over time. We get new insights, we accumulate new networks. So we want to create more efficiency in the processes in the organization which we have been doing, AKA our previous job, and use the extra time that we've created by virtue of our efficiency to learn new things, coach new people, advance our networks, figure out how we can move forward. Making your current job redundant is something that I have seen some of the best professionals do across disciplines, be it sports, be it deep tech, be it startups, Even in the government. Because the whole premise of growth is that we need to keep compounding, getting better a little by little, bit by bit, play by play, every single day. To do that, if we start with the explicit goal of saying that in a certain time, say X number of months or years, we should be able to automate at least half of the job so that we can spend that extra time in more creative pursuits, ideally inventing the next job that we want to gun for, either within the organization or outside it. The way to have a meaningful career is to make sure that we are achieving personal progress and organizational progress day in and day out, even on the hardest of days. At the very end, you need to reflect and ask, what did you learn? How do you grow? And this professionals in any discipline who really, you know, knock the ball out of the park are the ones who measure progress and compound consistently. So if you want to escape the wrath of the Peter principle, you want to keep your own incompetence in mind. If you're too stable, too comfortable in this company that you're a part of, perhaps you need to ask yourself, what is the origin of that comfort? Are you just trying to prolong status quo? If that's the case, your status quo is not going to last. We live in the 21st century where hyper growth and change are constant phenomena that we need to deal with. If your goal is to just settle in and let the ball run and be slightly passive, do your bare minimum, then it's just a matter of time before the organization finds somebody who's willing to do your job for slightly less amount of money. So you have to push yourself to understand how can you recreate or reinvent your job so that you can grow? And the people in your team, the people you work with, they can grow alongside. When you work towards automating your own job or making your job redundant, you have to spend that extra time in coaching your entire team, coaching the support staff, coaching your interns so that they can all work together, upskill themselves, and you can upskill yourself as well. So transcending Peter principle entails having a close eye on what moves the needle and what prolongs status quo. You always want to be in a job where you can experience consistent compounding progress on a day to day basis, even on the toughest day. And when you feel for a prolonged period of time that you are not really growing, your job is, you know, just something that you do. You need to complement it with a new skill set, a new way to go about it. Recently, I met with a diplomat of a large country. And what struck me most about the interaction with that person was that he realized that, you know, honestly, on a regular Wednesday, there is not much work to be done unless and until there's something truly surprising happening. So that person created a side hustle for himself, which entailed coaching other people, taking up writing, and he will be joining the NetworkCapital TV side Hustle Fellowship. He's a very senior diplomat. He's doing exceptionally well for himself and his country, but he's constantly looking out for the next big thing and the next big milestone so that he can, you know, escape the wrath of the Peter Principle. So, just to conclude, keep that in mind, Peter was right. In a complex hierarchy, we do rise to a level of incompetence. But there's a way out of it, and the way out of it is to try and automate our job, try and make our job redundant by creating new opportunities for ourselves and for others around. I hope you're finding some of these insights useful. I'm always eager to hear from you. Please let me know. What else would you like to hear? And if you're interested in the Network Capital side Hustle Fellowship, please go to NetworkCapital TV and check out the Fellowship section. The classes start on June 5th, and we're really excited to bring a very diverse cohort of fellows across age groups, across countries, across backgrounds, together for this immersive month of June. Take care. Talk to you soon.